OK, I usually write the view starting the week ahead of publication. Today is Thursday and I started gathering my thoughts. I will finish writing the View Friday or Saturday and email it out by Sunday night so it can be in the papers next week.
For the past weekend and the beginning of the week it was, “Quack, quack, I’m in luck, quack, quack, I’m a duck.” I don’t know how much rain came down but it was significant as there is water laying in the highway ditches all the way from here to Lloydminster. It was nice to see the sun as I was having visions of a month of monsoon weather. We have had that in the past and I don’t want to see that again. It is nice if you can just go forward and take your whole crop off but of course that doesn’t ever happen. There are always weather delays. It is the nature of the farming business.
In the Waseca area there is very little wheat left not harvested. The weather was dry and the wheat ripened quickly. Guys are desiccating the wheat now and not swathing. As soon as it was ready the guys were straight cutting and most of it came off good grade and high protein. The canola was seeded after the wheat and didn’t get growing because of the dry weather and stayed green longer when it rained. Almost all of the canola is now swathed and waiting for warm dry weather to cure it out and get dry. Harvest is a third to half done, but many large acreages of canola left to combine.
The dry year has showed up some deficiencies in the brain tillers system. When you don’t work the soil, things happen that you don’t want. As I drive around I see alkali creeping up on some parts of the field. The evidence is the foxtail and right beside it is the cattails in the wet spots. When I used to put on anhydrous, I found down about four or five inches was a layer of hardpan. I knew if I wanted to get a good crop, I had to get down and rip that hardpan up. I know, right now, anyplace that is growing foxtail, I could dig down and find hardpan. When it gets dry the salts come up and the water evaporates leaving a hardpan patch with alkali that only lets things like foxtail grow. In close proximity will be a wet spot full of cattails. If you want to farm the whole field, this fall you have to get in there, get rid of the catails as they only trap snow, making the water problem worse. Rip the ground up deep enough so that the salts can go back down. Next year you should be able to seed right through. If you can’t, wait until later, then seed the wet spot to oats or barley for green feed. Continue to do that until you can farm right through the patch. It is just common sense, don’t waste the land. Grow something.
We used to have 100 cows. One year, it was a wet spring and we went back after seeding and we double seeded the wet spots. We got enough green feed bales to keep the cows for the winter. It is not always peaches and cream, one year we went around and seeded all our sloughs and a big rain came. All we had left was a four-foot wide strip around every wet spot and the rest drowned out. You know the saying “Best laid plans of mice and men sometimes go awry and must be started over again.”
I have another question for all you zero tillers. If you worked all your trash down in the fall, do you think you would have to be spraying all these fungicides? I don’t know the answer, but you appear to be smarter than me. Is it possible that the dilemma you are in you caused by your own farming practice?
In politics, with this election on, the leaders are running all over the country, doing what politicians do, kissing babies and promising amazing things. What they don’t tell you is they will bribe you to vote for them with “your” money. Truly an amazing system. Some of the promises are so large you have to wonder how responsible some of these guys are. I don’t want more taxes. I will not be voting for someone who gleefully would run a deficit as I know sooner or later someone has to pay the piper and I don’t want it to be me. We pay enough taxes. Start managing what you got, not looking for more. I also will not vote for anyone who will hurt the businesses we have here in Western Canada. That only leaves me with one choice. I plan to vote for the Conservatives.
Quote of the week from Vern Higgins: “Be sure you smell the roses along the way, as you never know if you will get another day.”
Isn’t that true? Thank you, Vern.
